Carwyn Graves

Reimagine our relationship with the natural world through the Welsh poetic tradition. At a time of biodiversity loss and climate grief, we need to reset our relationship with the natural world. Cynefin helps us hear the voices of people down the centuries who have, through poetry, expressed a different way of connecting with the living world around us. Carwyn Graves explores how the Welsh poetic tradition offers a different view of nature and connecting to our place in the world, and demonstrates its power to help us address the challenges we face. Find fresh perspectives from themes of grief and loss mediated through snow and the cuckoo’s song, to ecological sensibilities in medieval poems and the generosity of the water that drives the water wheel. In a thousand years of poetry we see the natural world portrayed not as a pristine realm but a human home; bittersweet as well as welcoming. Above all Carwyn invites us through these poems, to encounter the living world - in seagulls and sheepflocks, a lake or wheatfield - not in the abstract but in all its sparkling specificity

In Tir – the Welsh word for ‘land’ – writer and ecologist Carwyn Graves takes us on a tour of seven key elements of the Welsh landscape, such as the ffridd, or mountain pasture, and the rhos, or wild moorland. By diving deep into the history and ecology of each of these landscapes, we discover that Wales, in all its beautiful variety, is at base just as much a human cultural creation as a natural phenomenon: its raw materials evolved alongside the humans that have lived here since the ice receded. In our modern era of climate concerns and polarised debates on land use, diet and more, it matters that we understand the world we are in and the roads we travelled to get here. By exploring each of these key landscapes and meeting the people who live, work and farm in them, Tir offers hope for a better future; one with stunningly beautiful, richly biodiverse landscapes that are ten times richer in wildlife than they currently are, and still full of humans working the land.